Heimsuchung

A house on a plot of land next to a lake in the Märkischen area of Brandenburg is the setting, twelve life histories, stories, fates from the ’20’s of the last century up until today are wound around it. The house and its inhabitants live through the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the war and its ending, the DDR, reunification and post-reunification times. The characters include: a farmer with plenty of land and his four daughters, who sell land to an architect and a Jewish manufacturer. An architect, who builds on the land, who is able to buy the Jew’s land cheaply during the thirties, but who has to flee overnight from the DDR after the war, because he bought screws from the West for the first major commission of his life and is now going to be tried for that. The Jewish family, some of whom emigrate to South Africa, and some of whom are murdered in the Third Reich. The architect’s wife, who stayed at home while the war ended, when the Russians came. A Red Army soldier. A woman writer, who returned home from Russian exile after the war, helped to construct the German Democratic Republic and for whom the house becomes her new home – she lets her doctor (who is also the personal doctor of a high-ranking politician) have the use of the orchard, but soon has to defend herself from him, because he makes use of his contacts to lay claim to her land. A female visitor. The sub-tenant who lives in the boat-house and who is caught by surprise by re-unification. A local boy who is a friend of the writer’s daughter, and the daughter herself, who breaks illegally into the house, now surrounded by court battles and slowly decaying, and lives there again for a few more days after re-unification.

The novel Heimsuchung (title of the English translation: Visitation) by Jenny Erpenbeck has been translated into Serbian by Jan Krasni under the title Pohođenje, published by Geopoetika, Belgrade, translated into Romanian by Andrei Anastasescu under the title Pădurea Klarei, published by Humanitas, Bucharest and translated into Slovenian by Tina Štrancar under the title Srečišče, published by Litera, Maribor.